July 30, 2024
Letter from the FLTI to the 62nd International Anti-War Assembly
Fierce imperialist counter-offensive attacking the working class and national opresseion warsnacional
The masses haven't surrendered
Workers fight, leaderships betray them
Comrades of the JRCL-RMF
Comrade Zengakuren
Comrades of the Antiwar Youth Committee,
We are sending you our revolutionary and internationalist greetings from the Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International / FLTI to your Anti-War International Assembly.
You will be gathered at a time when, under the leadership of the US imperialist bandits, Zionism, commanded by Biden and Netanyahu, is advancing in the OPERATION MASSACRE FINALE ON GAZA.
Ten months of genocide have already passed. Tons and tons of bombs have fallen on the small territory of Gaza. There are already no neighborhoods, houses, hospitals or schools left that have not been demolished there.
Hunger and lack of water are the powerful missiles used by the State of Israel to make the Palestinian masses surrender... but they have not succeeded.
As the resistance proclaims, Starve or die resisting! The people will not surrender. Free Palestine from the river to the sea!
Comrades,
It is necessary to break the siege of the Palestinian masses!
While they fight, day by day the cowardice of the native bourgeoisies of the region, both Arab and the Iranian theocracy, comes to light. They only seek the surrender of the resistance.
They brutally repress, as do the PLO and Fatah, the Palestinian masses of the West Bank who seek to enter into combat with their brothers in Gaza. They still keep under control the millions of Palestinian workers living in Lebanon. They act as a real fifth column of the heroic Palestinian resistance.
In this "holy alliance" the coward Putin who played the role of mercenary and murderer in Syria, where 600 thousand oppressed people were massacred, could not be missed. Rusia has a huge military base in Tartus, on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in Syria, barely 250 miles from Gaza. From there Putin protects the ships carrying supplies to the state of Israel. He is for the victory of the occupier, unlike the Yemeni nation that attacks any ship carrying weapons and supplies to Zionism.
From Wall Street to Beijing, from the butcher of Moscow to the imperialist Maastricht: they all want to impose the surrender of Gaza. They recognize the state of Israel and uphold the "two-state" policy, which is nothing other than Zionism's occupation of Palestine and the subjugation of its people to ghettos and concentration camps.
Comrades,
Surely you know that August 3 was set as an International Day of Struggle in solidarity with Gaza and for the freedom of the Palestinian prisoners. This day has been called by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and hundreds of organizations around the world have joined it.
In the USA a huge movement of youth and workers is developing against the Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people. This struggle clashes openly with the government of the butcher Biden, who directs the operations of Zionism against the Palestinian masses. As in the 1970s against the Vietnam War or later against the US occupation of Iraq, the rebellious youth of the US have won the streets and together with the Black movement and the working class have opened a new front of struggle of the Palestinian people in the very entrails of the imperialist beast.
They surrounded the Capitol while the fascist Netanyahu was being cheered by the representatives of the financial oligarchy of Wall Street, both Republican and Democrat.
The American youth have been the protagonists of university takeovers, fighting in the streets of New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Charlotte, etc. and lately they have united their struggle with that of the Black movement of "Black Lives Matter".
That is why the demand put on the streets by this movement of the American youth and workers is: from Brooklyn to Gaza, no justice, no peace!
Thus, a mass movement for Palestine stands up in the US raising the demands of the black movement and the workers who also openly clash with that scam of the "left" of the Democratic Party headed by the billionaire and Zionist Sanders and his partner Ocasio-Cortez.
Comrades,
By the time you are holding your Anti-War Assembly, the International Day of Struggle of August 3 will be over.
The situation in the Middle East is getting worse. Neither Iran nor Hezbollah can contain the Palestinian masses in Lebanon who are trying to enter the fight. The crisis and momentary weakness of the American government in the midst of the US electoral situation is forcing Zionism to deepen its total war. At this moment it is attacking the districts of Beirut.
In these conditions, comrades, we propose a task that cannot be postponed:
Let us make our own the call of the Palestinian resistance and let the response to such genocide not only be a day of struggle, but let this day be a step to set up an International Committee to coordinate and centralize all the solidarity with the Palestinian cause in the five continents!
It is not only the US students who are fighting, but our Zengakuren comrades have marched to the Zionist embassy in Tokyo condemning the Zionist massacre. Comrades, we are with you!
It is high time for a decisive intervention of the working class pushing for a World General Strike to stop the genocide in Gaza and with the internationalist unity of the proletariat to confront the counterrevolutionary offensives of imperialism against the oppressed peoples and its own working classes!
A victory of Zionism in Gaza would be a new foothold for superior adventures of imperialism on the planet.
Comrades,
Well into the 21st century, it is abundantly clear that the epoch of crises, wars and revolutions is deepening day by day.
After the crash of 2008 and the successive rounds of the crisis that followed, the US is returning to the world market, where it had lost its undisputed hegemony. It does so by showing off its gunboats, throwing its crisis at the entire world, fighting inch by inch for its spheres of influence and by shooting.
From 2008, the "great" Germany, France and the imperialist Maastricht began to control, with high tariffs and autarchy, the European market from Portugal to the Russian steppes. Russia was supplying gas, energy and minerals to imperialist Europe and the latter was providing Moscow's industrial-military apparatus with high technology.
US imperialism was not able to enter Europe with Trump's trade war, but came back at it by stepping on it with NATO. They used Putin's invasion of an oppressed nation like Ukraine to cut off the flow of raw materials from Russia to imperialist Maastricht and dislocated the division of labor and control of the European market by the Franco-German axis. This opened a huge crisis in the whole of Europe and particularly for the “great” Germany and its partner, French imperialism. Now, they are both placing a big share of their factory capacity, their state-of-the-art technology and financial capital to develop the war industry.
On its end, US imperialism, with NATO, have already placed themselves on the borders with Russia, while Putin insists, with his partition of Ukraine, on being the gendarme of the business of imperialism and the capitalists in the whole Eurasia. That is the role he has been fulfilling.
The successive rounds of the global crash have even hit “big” China. There, dozens of commercial banks have collapsed, the big construction companies have melted down and a true "real estate bubble" is in full expansion, like that of the US imperialism in 2008.
From South Korea and Taiwan, the US shows its cannons and carries out military ostentation and harassment. This forces China to place more of its surplus, amidst its crisis, investing in arms.
This is the inevitable tendency of the capitalist system during the imperialist stage. The bankrupt capitalist system prevents the development of the productive forces; what it develops are productive forces. As Lenin would say, war is the most important business of bankrupt imperialism.
The world crash and its successive rounds have broken the balance and the division of labor in the world economy and policy and they have dislocated the international labour division. A huge political crisis of dispute has opened up for the zones of influence and of brutal imperialist counter-offensive against the world working class.
Comrades,
Bankrupt imperialism comes to define historically 1989 in its favor, seeking to colonize the former workers' states with an aggressive policy, while restarting a huge dispute in all areas of influence and for control of the branches of production.
In this “dark century”, as you call it, inter-imperialist disputes express the fight over who will be politically and militarily the winner in the dispute over the enormous sources of raw materials and the industrial-military apparatus of Russia and with the enormous internal market of China.
This will not develop peacefully, but these large capitalist countries with powerful commercial and industrial bourgeoisies, closely linked to the capitalist world-economy, will have to be colonized or semi-colonized with invasions, custom wars and counter-revolutionary wars. There are too many imperialist powers and those that exist, starting with the US, are bankrupt.
In addition, the imperialist powers are seeking for direct agents of their businesses to emerge in those countries to influence them from within. This is what explains the strong Bonapartist regimes that exist in Russia, China, Vietnam and Cuba itself. They are regimes that are offensive against their working class and defensive against the aggressive policy of imperialism in the world economy in crisis.
We recently saw how Xi Jinping called on China's biggest businessmen to join the Communist Party and submit to its discipline... The fact is that, in the disarray and crisis of the Chinese economy, large sectors of this bourgeoisie have direct relations or have merged with international financial capital.
The world market has shrunk. The crash has devoured millions of jobs. The population is growing demographically. The fight for the surplus becomes more acute. There is no longer a place for “independent” capitalist countries and as we see in the semi-colonies, the possibility of the national bourgeoisies to bargain their businesses with imperialism has come to an end. A true plan for the colonization of the semi-colonial world is underway.
If the working class does not prevent it, wars for new markets, and in particular for Russia and China, will be the order of the day. That is the inevitable tendency of rotting imperialist capitalism.
The tensions in Taiwan and South Korea, as well as the war in Ukraine, anticipate what we say here.
But, to go into higher counterrevolutionary offensives, the imperialist bourgeoisies, and of USA in particular, must defeat their own working class and that of the colonial and semi-colonial world that they oppress. The imperialist powers become a thousand times more aggressive.
The margins for class conciliation have ended. Reformism, an agent of imperialism, can no longer pass off the handouts it received yesterday as reforms. An era of “counter-reformism” has opened.
The possibility of the emergence of governments such as Trump in the US, Le Pen in France or Vox in Spain, are the indication that the establishment of the great imperialist powers has decided to take out the whip to deliver very harsh counterrevolutionary blows to its own working class.
This plan advances because the reformist parties of Stalinists and social-traitors betray the proletariat, placing it at the feet of their executioners, whom they call “democratic”, “progressive” or “anti-imperialist”. It is the old and perfidious “popular front” policy of Stalinism in the 1930s, where the working class is subjected to the bourgeoisie and must abandon all its demands including the most important of them, which is the fight for power.
Thanks to these class collaboration fronts and their mermaid songs, mass offensives are disorganized so that big capital can later crush them with Bonapartism and fascism… One does not work without the other. They are two ends of the same rope that bourgeoisie uses to strangle revolutionary process.
As we have seen, in France, an infamous pact of the neo-Stalinist left (self- proclaimed as “progressive”) of Mélenchon has succeeded, which, with the excuse of “defeating Le Pen”, cynically made an agreement with Macron, when that government is which has taken away all the conquests of the working class, such as the 35-hour work week and retirements, and imposed labor flexibility.
This also happens in the Spanish State where it has been the PSOE and Podemos, supported by Stalinism from the Labor Union leadership, which harshly attacked the workers' conquests, they crushed the uprising for self-determination in Catalonia and saved the monarchy for the umpteenth time.
Syriza did the same in Greece, supported by the Stalinist union bureaucracy, aborting a pre-revolutionary situation years ago.
Comrades,
The task of the reformist left during wars is to place the world working class in the trenches of its class enemy.
Yesterday we saw it in Syria, where these leaderships made a front with imperialism to "defeat terrorism." Thus they supported the dog Bashar and the murderer Putin in their massacre of the Syrian revolutionary masses.
In Palestine they gave their condolences to Zionism when the resistance defended itself by taking hostage fascist settlers armed to the teeth who are usurping their land.
Now they have placed the enormous international solidarity with martyred Gaza at the feet of the Iranian theocracy and the traitors of the PLO and Al Fatah in the West Bank.
In Ukraine, most of these currents present Putin as an “anti-imperialist fighter” who, according to them, would come to “put a limit on NATO,” thus justifying the invasion of “great” Russia into oppressed Ukraine.
These opportunists of Marxism deny that Ukraine is an oppressed nation, with centuries of oppression by the Tsars and then by Stalinism, which, like them, transformed great Russia into a “prison of nations.”
For Lenin, there is one principle position before wars: one is to be militarily defencist when a colonial or semi-colonial country is attacked by an power that invades it; and one it is to be anti-defensist when the proletariat is the one fighting in the battle front dying for their own imperialist bourgeoisie. On the other hand, one is to be for peace when two oppressed countries go to a fratricide war. The program is to unify the struggle against imperialism.
Not having such defensist policy on the invasion of Russian to Ukraine is a criminal policy. The more Putin invades Ukraine, the more he pushes a desperate people and an already divided nation into the arms of the European Union, the IMF, which in turn plunders it, and the imperialist transnational corporations that steal its wealth.
While the majority of the world reformist left is in Putin's trench in his invasion of Ukraine, other sectors, no less capitulators of reformism, affirm that with the pro-imperialist government of Zelensky, NATO and the imperialist Maastricht government, the war of national liberation can be won. This is a true mirage.
The scoundrels of NATO and the European Union are not at all for the victory of the oppressed nation. In the middle of the war, they have already taken, with Cargill and Monsanto, the wheat and cereals from the black lands of Ukraine and are doing fabulous businesses like the French ArcelorMittal, while the IMF has put Ukraine in debt with double and triple chains.
We Trotskyists affirm that only Ukraine will achieve its national independence as it did yesterday in the 1920s: with a government of the workers' and soldiers' councils.
Comrades,
What the fight for the national liberation of an oppressed people needs in the first place is the unity of its working class. We know of the courageous pronouncement of unions, labor organizations and Marxist currents that fight in Ukraine.
It is necessary to insist a thousand and once that we need a program and a policy of the working class independent of Zelensky and the pro-USA government that in the middle of the war have torn away all economic, union, reunion and organization rights from the Ukrainian working class.
All this while the imperialist aid did not go beyond a few World War II tanks and missiles that only guarantee reaching the borders already established in the Donbass and Crimea by the Moscow bandits.
At the hands of NATO, the IMF and USA, Ukraine will not be independent nor will it defeat the invasion.
The unity of the working class from Kyiv to Donbass becomes decisive. In the territories controlled by Moscow, the workers of the big mines of Donetsk, Lugansk, Mariupol, etc., have been laid off by the thousands and brought to subhuman living conditions by the Russian oligarchs and their centurions in that occupied region.
The same thing happens with the workers of the Kyiv governed regions.
The task of uniting the demands of a single working class from the Donbass and Crimea to Kyiv, resuming the fight for the defeat of Moscow, the break with the IMF and the disavowing of a fraudulent foreign debt, would quickly lead to the fraternization of the workers of the whole Ukraine and to open trenches in the rearguard of the invading troops.
This would be a true electric shock for the workers and youth of Russia who are deserting in their thousands because they refuse to go to fight in Ukraine and, above all, it would be a hard blow to the union bureaucracies, social-imperialist parties and the Stalinism that controls the European working class, to demonstrate that it is these leaderships that are real servants of NATO since they defend the imperialist governments of Maastricht, which are all NATO members.
Only the unity of the Ukrainian working class, with it and its organizations taking political, economic and military control of the war to expel the invaders and break with the IMF and the Europe of Maastricht, is the way to achieve the national liberation of Ukraine, unite the Ukrainian proletariat with the working class of the whole Europe and to be able to make real what the title of the declaration claim of the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine proclaims: “for a people's peace, not an imperial peace! ”.
Together with you we agree when this declaration states: “we need a peace based on and supported by the interests of the people and workers of Ukraine and Russia.”
Comrades,
But the masses have not given up...
The working class fights. The leaderships betray it.
As we saw, the heroic Palestinian resistance is bringing the American masses back to their feet.
Likewise, we have witnessed huge spontaneous uprisings and mass revolts against hunger, as happened in Sri Lanka and Iraq, and today in Kenya and Bangladesh, to name a few examples.
In Latin America, huge processes of uprisings of the working class and poor peasants developed from 2019-2020 onwards. The Chile of Dignity, the revolutionary general strike in Colombia, the combats of the Ecuadorian masses, the enormous workers and peasants mobilizations against both the military coup in Bolivia and the palace coup in Peru, demonstrate what we are saying here.
These revolutionary processes were deviated and betrayed by Stalinism, the renegades of Marxism, the trade union bureaucracies and the so-called World Social Forum that yesterday with the scam of the “Bolivarian Revolution” inflicted serious defeats on the anti-imperialist struggles of the Latin American masses at the beginning of the 21st century.
The new revolutionary offensive of workers and peasants in Latin America was met with a hard stab in the back imposed by the Stalinist scourge: the selling out of workers and peasants Cuba to imperialism and the capitalist restoration.
The war cry of Castroism of “socialism no longer exists, even in Cuba”, was the greatest betrayal of the working class of the entire American continent, while a new capitalist class arose inside the island and the majority of the workers live in conditions of hunger and misery as in Haiti.
Thus have arisen now Petro in Colombia, Boric in Chile, and the return to power of the MAS in Bolivia, the return of Lula in Brazil, etc., that is to say, a true pro-US imperialist left that managed to stabilize the imperialist control of the region.
They took over and prolonged the trap, the deceit and the expropriation of the anti-imperialist struggle imposed before by Castro, Chávez, the Kirchners, Morales, etc.
In the first decade of the 21st century with the World Social Forum and now with the so-called “Progressive International”, which also includes the American left supporting Sanders and Biden “against Trump”, imperialism managed to contain the different waves of mass struggle that shook the American continent.
One of its high points was the struggle of the American working class and the uprising of the black people against Trump in 2020, which today all the traitors to socialism want us to forget.
It is the masses who pay for such betrayals with the disorganization of their ranks, discouragement, unheard-of sufferings, enormous social crises, etc.
It is on this basis that Milei, the palace self-coups like that of Dina Boluarte in Peru or the last attempted coup in Bolivia arose.
As if this were not enough, the Latin American working class suffers on itself the scorn of the balance that remains of the scam of the so-called “Bolivarian Revolution” in Venezuela.
Maduro has been posing for years as an “anti-imperialist” in Latin America, but he did not affect a single interest or property of the transnationals and bankers, while imperialism expropriated all the funds of Venezuela abroad and even the more than 15,000 service stations of its oil companies in the south of US.
The “Bolibourgeoisie”, which emerged from the officer caste of the Venezuelan army, is the sector of the ruling classes that enriched itself the most, as a partner of the commercial bourgeoisie. Chavismo led the masses to a situation of desperation in the name of “socialism of the XXI century”, which turned out to be workers eating from the garbage dumps in the streets.
The masses fought... The leaderships betrayed them... The real crisis that exists is that of revolutionary leadership: the lack of revolutionary vanguard parties fighting for the socialist revolution and the internationalist unification of the workers of the American continent and at the international level.
The parties that claimed to be of revolutionary socialism and the Fourth International today march arm in arm with Stalinism, as they do with the alleged Cuban Stalinist “left”, and have been left hanging to the bourgeois parliaments, the reactionary native bourgeoisies and the class collaboration fronts...
The last chapter of this history of the class struggle in the 21st century has not yet been written. The proletariat has not been taken out of the scene, in spite of the hard partial defeats imposed on it by the leaderships that betrayed it and created for it at the international level the worst conditions to fight.
Comrades,
We salute your Anti-War Assembly. We know of your hard struggle from Japan to defeat the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the genocide in Palestine and also your government, which Is a direct ally of Anglo-US imperialism. We also know of your enormous struggle against Stalinism and other treacherous leaderships. Know that in that fight you can count on us. We are in the same trench and on the same barricade.
Comrades of the JRCL-RMF,
The revolutionary currents find ourselves facing great challenges. The fight cannot be country by country. Because un the same momento that you openly confront the government of Fumio Kishida in Japan, the courageous Trotskyists of Argentina, to give just one example, seek to regroup the ranks of the working class to settle accounts with that proto-fascist beast of Milei that has emerged from the bowels of this rotten capitalist system.
The struggle to regroup the internationalist forces of the world proletariat is the task of the moment.
We must set up an International Committee to organize the World General Strike to stop the massacre of the Palestinian people! For the destruction of the Zionist state of Israel! Free Palestine from the river to the sea with its capital in Jerusalem! For the United Socialist States of the Maghreb and the Middle East!
Let's regroup our forces to fight together for the whole Ukrainian (from Donbas to Kiev) working class to take the political and military leadership of the fight to expel Putin's invading troops and unite with the Russian and European working class to confront NATO and the imperialist Maastricht! For a working-class, Soviet and independent Ukraine! For the United Socialist States of Europe!
From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, the struggle on the American continent is far from defeated. The youth and workers of the U.S. today are in the vanguard of the confrontation against the tyranny of Wall Street.
From black Africa to the martyred Chinese proletariat, the working class is one!
The alternative is clear: socialism or war.
Open the road to militant internationalism!
Long live the international socialist revolution!
For the Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International / FLTI:
Milenka López y Juan Sánchez (LSTI de Bolivia), Lourdes Fernández (POI-CI), Giovanni Alberotanza (Avanzata Proletaria), Abu Muad (The Truth of the Oppressed of Middle East), Raúl P. (LSTI of Perú), Cheo Navarro (Utopía la Palabra, Colombia), Claudia P. y Alejandro Flores (LOI-CI), James Sakala (WIL)
Carlos Munzer, Director of the Editorial Board of the newspaper
“The International Workers Organizer” |
